Software Testers of Cincinnati

The Software Testers of Cincinnati (SToC) had their first meeting last night at MaxTrain in Mason, OH. Using the “If you build it they will come” heuristic, Brett Leonard scheduled the meetup and there was a great turnout! Sixteen software testers from about eight different companies attended the meeting. Here is a brief summary of events:

Introductions – Brett Leonard introduced himself and then asked all of us to do the same. He asked for us to provide our name, company, the type of environment in which we work (tools used, methodologies, etc.), and what topics we are interested in discussing. There were a few trends:

Automation – Quite a few attendees wanted to talk about ways to use automation and hear about how others have used it.

Agile – A surprising number of people work in what they call an agile environment. I’ll be interested in learning in the coming months what they mean by agile.

Exploratory Testing – A few of us have been exposed to the ideas of exploratory testing as described by Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Michael Bolton. We want to hear how others are using this approach and discuss when it is most appropriate to use.

Load/Performance Testing – The group was mostly involved in functional testing, so items on the para-functional side or non-functional side intrigue us.

Organization – How is the development team structured? Where do people sit? How do they communicate? How many testers do you have for each developer? Why? We would like to know!

Next Meeting – We then tried to decide what we would do for the next meeting. Brett has attended the Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing, and we decided to adopt their method for our second meeting. Four people will present experience reports related to test automation. These presentations should last no longer than 15 minutes, then the audience gets about 15 minutes to ask questions.

Pizza – I would say the majority of the meeting involved testers conferring while waiting on the pizza. This was fun for me. I spent the time to talking to testers about what they are testing, what they’ve tested before, etc. It was a lot of fun.

The next meeting is February 23, 2010 at MaxTrain. If you are anywhere near the Cincinnati area then please join the Software Testers of Cincinnati group on LinkedIn and join us next month!